The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs. For these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed. In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased.
However, there are challenges to implementing such smaller and smaller features and processes in semiconductor fabrication. For example, in the course of fabricating semiconductor devices, a one or more patterned hard mask features may be formed on the device. An etching process may be used to form the pattern features. Such etching process may cause sharp inside corners in the features, which may reduce device etching performance.
One may fill-in the sharp corners by adding a photoresist/conformal coating layer to the device. Traditionally the coating is added by dropping a large volume of liquid photoresist/conformal coating on the device and spinning the device wafer to spread the liquid coating. This process cannot be performed in a traditional CMOS processing chamber. In addition, this process forms an uneven coating, such as a thin coating in high step places and a thick coating in the low places, such as between raised features on the device. Thus, the spin-on coating process generally fails to achieve a uniform high-step coverage polymer thin film. Another problem found with conventional coating systems include having a high-temperature CVD deposition process where there may be contamination problems if the structure wafer is coated with a photoresist film. As should be understood, conventional spin-on coating systems can not achieve a substantially uniform polymer type thin film deposition on semiconductor device wafers.
Thus, an improved a system for thin film formation on a semiconductor device using a vaporizing polymer spray deposition system.